Many low income households survive on just food stamps. In order to better understand their plight and challenges, some people attempt to live on a budget of $1 per meal per person a day.

This is the story of one local family who is taking the food stamp challenge. If you want to learn more about trying the challenge, you can learn about it here.

-Kashif

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We have three people in our family who are giving this a try. We figured out what that will give us to work with dollar wise for the seven days.

Then we planned all the meals for all three people.  Some of  these meals are coming out of  “stock” on  hand.  We priced all the ingredients and started with that as a sunk cost.  Next we figured out the cost of the Rotary breakfasts as well as the school lunches, this too became a sunk cost taking away from what was available to spend for the week.  Finally we shopped carefully buying manager’s specials and refusing to purchase items where there was any labor component we could do ourselves.  We are baking the bread ourselves for example.  We substituted a daily salad with a combination of apples and carrots.  We also spent about ten dollars less that the allotment figuring that we would either need something else or that we had forgotten to include the cost of something we were going to use already in our pantry.

On Sunday, Mother’s day and the day before this started we loaded up on the last of the Starbucks lattes we would have for the next seven days and we ate hearty meals to build up a bit much like a bear going into hibernation.

So,  we are off and  running on our adventure and glad we don’t really have to live like this for  the long term.

-CJ